This past summer, undergraduates Casey Benzaken and Hayley Platt spent two months in Kisumu, Kenya, working with Pamoja Community Based Organization. Under the guidance of fellow YRG member and Pamoja founder Patrick Mbullo, Casey and Hayley helped collect data for a mixed-methods study about pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). For the past two years, Pamoja has been working to connect girls, aged 15-24 and at high risk of HIV infection, with clinics to be prescribed PrEP. If taken properly, PrEP can lower the chance of contracting HIV by over 90%.
In the Pamoja office, Casey and Hayley spent the first few weeks learning about Pamoja’s programming for orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) and DREAMS women. During this time they also helped the Monitoring and Evaluation office do a quality check of their data, designed ODK forms to capture the PrEP data from clinical charts, and completed a literature review about PrEP. Over the following weeks, Casey and Hayley entered the clinical data into the ODK forms for further analysis.
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